With a combined age of more than 200 years, three soccer enthusiasts on Monday embarked on a seven-day journey around the nation to encourage more people to play the world’s most popular sport.
The trio — 76-year-old retired soccer coach Huang Wu-hsiung (黃武雄), 65-year-old coffee-shop owner Lin Chiang (林將) and 64-year-old interior designer Chen Li (陳立) — have co-authored a book titled “Fuleco: World Cup Nations” (Fuleco: 世界盃足球戰國誌), which was published last week. The dream they have in common is that Taiwan can host the FIFA World Cup finals in 2054.
On their journey, Lin is riding a cycle rickshaw, which has a large soccer ball on top, while Huang is using a wheelchair pushed by Chen.
Photo: Yu Tai-lang, Taipei Times
Lin said they hope the road trip will stir up people’s passion for soccer.
“We want to use about a week to travel around the nation, visit our friends and promote the World Cup. We want to encourage more people to play soccer because it is a wonderful thing,” Lin said.
Before opening a coffee shop in Hualien, Lin was a sports writer for several Chinese-language newspapers and was assigned to cover the FIFA World Cup finals several times. He also arranged a World Cup tour group in 1982, taking people to watch games in Madrid.
He said the soccer match between Taiwan and Japan in 1967 was the one he would never forget.
“At that time, the nation had yet to construct the North Link Railway,” he said. “I took off early in the morning to take a bus to Yilan’s Suao (蘇澳) from Hualien, from Suao I switched to a regular service train to Taipei. After I arrived in Taipei, I took a taxi to go to the stadium and I saw the game I would remember for the rest of my life.”
Huang, on the other hand, is the nation’s first internationally certified soccer coach and referee, and served as manager of the national team, as well as the Flying Camel (飛駝隊) of the Combined Logistics Command. The Flying Camel won the championship five times in the 1980s and 1990s.
Huang moved to Hualien three years ago due to an injury, and he befriended Lin and Chen. He said the three enjoy talking about soccer so much they decided to write a book together.
Aside from the development of soccer in Taiwan, the book also records some of the significant events affecting Taiwan’s participation in the World Cup. For example, Taiwan withdrew from the qualifiers for the 1958 World Cup finals due to the Taiwan Strait Crisis and the Artillery Bombardment of Kinmen on Aug. 23, 1958, even though the team were two-time Asian Cup champions.
TRAGEDY: An expert said that the incident was uncommon as the chance of a ground crew member being sucked into an IDF engine was ‘minuscule’ A master sergeant yesterday morning died after she was sucked into an engine during a routine inspection of a fighter jet at an air base in Taichung, the Air Force Command Headquarters said. The officer, surnamed Hu (胡), was conducting final landing checks at Ching Chuan Kang (清泉崗) Air Base when she was pulled into the jet’s engine for unknown reasons, the air force said in a news release. She was transported to a hospital for emergency treatment, but could not be revived, it said. The air force expressed its deepest sympathies over the incident, and vowed to work with authorities as they
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
Police have issued warnings against traveling to Cambodia or Thailand when others have paid for the travel fare in light of increasing cases of teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people being tricked into traveling to these countries and then being held for ransom. Recounting their ordeal, one victim on Monday said she was asked by a friend to visit Thailand and help set up a bank account there, for which they would be paid NT$70,000 to NT$100,000 (US$2,136 to US$3,051). The victim said she had not found it strange that her friend was not coming along on the trip, adding that when she
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to
RSS